


we're in over our heads (we're holding our breath)

by ohmygodwhy



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Literal Sleeping Together, M/M, Nogitsune Trauma, Post-Season/Series 03, Pre-Relationship, that's a really and truly a tag and i think that's beautiful, working through trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-11
Updated: 2018-02-11
Packaged: 2019-03-16 06:15:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13630371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmygodwhy/pseuds/ohmygodwhy
Summary: “Whoa,” Scott says, steadying, like there’s nothing weird about climbing through his window at—he glances blearily at the clock—four in the morning, “You're good, you’re fine, you’re fine, Stiles.”“Scott?” He manages to say, voice raspy. He wonders if he’d been yelling.“Yeah,” Scott says, absently rubbing at Stiles’ arms like he’s trying to sooth the dream away.(stiles needs to find a better way to deal with things. instead, he dreams of conversations with scott he's never had.)





	we're in over our heads (we're holding our breath)

**Author's Note:**

> i watched this whole ass series over the course of a month or so bc i'm a fool who does things all the way or not at all. i loved season 3 because im predictable, and the childhood friends/growing up together trope gets me every single time because again, i'm predictable!!! it makes me so happy!!! i just finished it today so i'm super in my feelings and i've been wanting to write a post-s3 fic since i finished it. 
> 
> anyways, can't believe season 6b didn't happen and scott/stiles has been endgame since day 1!!

 

So here’s the thing: demonic possession, like, being possessed by a literal ancient demon like something straight out of the fucking Exorcist, is kind of a hard thing to get over. Hard to go through, hard to get rid of, but hard to get over, too.

When the demon inside of you that was you but also not you because he made a copy of your body but you still had your own body at the same time—whenever he thinks back on it, it makes his head hurt, and he thinks back on it a lot so his head hurts a _lot—_ and then proceeded to try to kill your dad and your best friend and all your other friends and kind of succeeded, too? That’s the kind of stuff that leads to like, therapy. And he’s not new to therapy, especially not after his mom died, but he’s never really in the mood to relive the period of time when an actual dark spirit was living inside his mind and body. _Especially_ his mind.

The whole ‘trapped in a basement with his foot in a bear trap that was actually just the woods because he was having a super vivid nightmare’ thing was probably his breaking point. That, or the MRI. The look on his dad’s face. The creepy Orderly sticking a needle in his arm and smiling as he passed out. Watching himself crack open and turn into dust. It’s a lot. It’s been a really long month.

But he’s dealing! Considering everything that’s happened, he thinks he’s dealing pretty well. If this was an episode of Deal or No Deal, he’d be leaving with the best suitcase—he’s never actually _seen_ an episode, but he’s pretty sure it’s about suitcases full of money and picking the right one. So he’d leave with a great deal, because he’s dealing with it great.

Yeah, he still has nightmares, but who wouldn’t have nightmares post-demonic possession? It might be the most normal thing that’s happened to him all month. He was hoping the sleepwalking would stop, but he hasn’t had one of those scary triple-decker Inception dreams in a while, so he guesses it’s a fair trade.

He dreams about the nogitsune dragging him through the basement and into the woods, except instead of mud on the forest floor it’s blood, it’s Scott’s blood and Derek’s and Allison’s and Lydia's and his dad’s and he has to solve the riddles or they’re all gonna die, and maybe they’re already dead, and _when is a door not a door? everyone has it but no one can lose it, everyone has it but no one can lose it,_ and he looks up and it’s his own face looking down at him—

He wakes up huddled in the shower, shivering under the cold spray and trying to wash invisible blood out of his shirt. “Shadow,” he’s saying, like an actual crazy person, “Shadow. Shadow. Shadow.”

Awake, he possesses all of his usual grace, and slips. He accepts his fate quickly, letting his body slide down until he’s flat on his back, closing his eyes against the cold water. He’s glad his dad is working a night shift, or he probably would’ve come running at the sound, and Stiles has been trying to limit the amount of times his dad has to wake up in the middle of the night to help him calm down. Because he’s dealing! And one of the steps of his 100 Percent Success Rate Dealing-With-It Plan is to deal with it by himself.

Everyone has shit to deal with, and he’s just about done with being everyone’s priority—like, maybe back at the beginning of all this he would’ve liked some attention, but that was more of the pretty lady and/or man kind of attention, not the ‘if I look away, you might disappear or die or turn into your demon counterpart again’ kind. Back when his mom died, it was the ‘I’m sorry for your loss you must be so sad’ kind of attention, and he learned how to get rid of that quickly enough. So he can deal with this. He knows where he is, and that he’s not dreaming, and that the nogitsune is gone.

He’s himself. He’s not dreaming.

(He counts his fingers just in case.)

 

The morning after he wakes up in the shower, he spends the day shivering. Scott asks him what’s up, and Stiles says he’s probably just getting sick. He knows cold doesn’t get you sick, but spending an hour lying fully-clothed in a cold shower might do the trick. He can hope.

(“We’ve stopped shivering,” he remembers, “Do you know what that means?”

“Conserving energy. The body shuts downs,” he’d answered. “We’re conserving energy,” and maybe that had been the moment he was really and truly fucked.)

Point is, he’d rather just be sick than have it be some weird after-effect of having his body split in two and then watching himself disintegrate. That would mean it’s a supernatural-y problem, and he’s had enough of the supernatural to last two or three lifetimes.

“You sure?” Scott asks, all worried, like he’s not the one who’s first love died in his arms a few weeks ago.

“Yeah,” Stiles says, “I probably caught a cold or something. It’s been freezing lately.”

Scott gives him that Look, the one that means he’s said something concerning, like _I literally can’t read a thing right now,_ or _I know I was joking earlier but I think you might for real be a werewolf._

“You’re still cold?” he asks, even more worried than before, and Stiles thing he must've been born to be a werewolf with those stupid hurt-puppy eyes he has.

“No,” Stiles says, “No, not—not really, no. Just the usual level of temperature-feeling here.”

“It’s been in the late eighties lately, dude.”

“Which is why I have not been cold. In fact, I’ve been super like, room-temperature, actually. Perfectly eighties. Temperature, not decade.”

Scott doesn’t look convinced, “You still having nightmares?”

“Are you?” he counters, which might be a little cruel, but he still has a Dealing With It plan he has to stick to.

Scott frowns, “Of course. How could I not be? How could you not be?”

“I’m not… _not._ I’m just. Dealing with them. I’ll be fine.”

“I know,” Scott says, like he can will it into being, the same way he claimed he would somehow fist-fight frontotemporal dementia into curing itself, “You’re Stiles.”

“That’s me,” Stiles agrees.

“Which means,” Scott continues, “you’re my best friend. Which means you can tell me anything. Which means you can talk to me about...all this.”

“All this.”

“You know what I mean. You stuck with me through the whole turning into a werewolf and almost killing you thing. I can stick with you through this.”

“I am a great friend,” Stiles says, because it sounds like something he would usually say, “I probably should’ve dropped your ass when you wolfed out on me in the locker room.”

“Probably,” Scott agrees, “But I’m glad you didn’t. Even if it got you, like, possessed.”

“Yeah, that wasn’t super fun,” Stiles laughs despite himself, “It was actually pretty terrifying and - violating, in so many ways, on so many planes of existence.”

Scott laughs too, even though it’s not funny like, at all, lighter than he’s sounded in weeks, and Stiles feels a little bit better.

 

He dreams about his kitchen, and early morning sunlight streaming through the window and painting the room like something out of a well-shot movie. The soft sunrise feel directors strive for. Scott’s there, cooking something on the stove and not burning it somehow—maybe that’s how he knows it’s a dream—and Lydia’s there, too elbows on the counter, a cup of coffee in her hands. The light’s hitting her perfectly, like it always does, reflecting off her hair like a halo.

It feels like the old days, the Saturday mornings Scott would spend with him when his dad had to go in early and Scott’s mom was passed out after working a night shift, except for the incredible addition of Lydia.

“Hey,” he says, voice hushed.

“Hey,” Scott says, “How’d you sleep?”

Stiles actually thinks about it, pretends that he’s awake, “Pretty good, actually. What’re you making? It smells good.”

“Pancakes.”

“With bananas?”

“Duh.”

Stiles smiles. Sits at the counter and feels the cool granite under his arms. It feels calm. Comfortable like it hasn’t felt since he drowned for sixteen hours to save their parents from an evil Druid and opened the door in their minds to the supernatural or however Deaton likes to say it.

Which is why something has to ruin it.

“Allison is dead.” Scott says without turning around. Stiles’ stomach drops. That’s what’s missing here, he realizes. An empty seat on the other side of Lydia.

“She is,” he agrees, no matter how much he doesn’t want to, “I stabbed you. I tried to kill you.”

“You did,” Scott agrees, which stings more than he thought it would, “You almost killed yourself.”

“I—“ he says, and stops. Feels Lydia’s eyes on him even though she hasn’t said a word, and Scott’s. He doesn’t want to be here. He doesn’t want to talk about this. He’d rather go back to the calm. He rather go back to being dragged through the mud than talk about all the things he’s done—the things _that thing_ did with him. What they did together.

He wakes up tangled in the sheets on his bed, out of breath and more terrified than he’s been in weeks. He doesn’t sleep for the rest of the night.

 

So here’s the thing, the really awful thing he hates and wishes wasn’t a thing: he remembers twisting the sword. He remembers stabbing Scott with a sword, and then twisting it. And he remembers how good it felt to twist it, driven deep into Scott’s stomach, remembers tasting his fear and pain and confusion and thriving. He remembers the hospital and the tunnels and laughing in Scott’s mom’s face.

The other thing is, he knows it wasn’t him. He knows he didn’t do those things. But he remembers how it felt to do them. The sharp electricity of Allison’s taser. The cool handle of the sword.

It’s like—it’s like it wasn’t enough to take his body and fuck with his head, it had to force these things into him, make him feels things he didn't ever want to feel, how thrilling it was to have Scott’s blood between his fingers, warm and wet.

Some real serious fucked up stuff. Kate burning an entire family to death level of fucked up. _Peter_ level of fucked up, which is a hard level to reach. (He thought once that Peter and Kate would be perfect for each other, scary motherfuckers that they are, and immediately rinsed his brain out with soap at the images it brought to mind.)

 _Let me in,_ and pounding on lockers.

He let it in, that second time, he knows he did, but he still feels—god, he still feels _violated._ It’s a word his therapist used last week to help him describe what he was feeling, even though he hasn’t told her the whole story. Gods knows they’d toss him back into Eichen House before he could finish saying _demonic possession_. She tells him it’s normal to feel this way, to feel violated, and he tells her he doesn’t care if it’s normal, he just doesn’t want to feel that way anymore.

He feels like something was taken from him, like he was stripped down and laid bare and now everyone knows what kind of person he is, all twisted up and bad.

He’s always known he was something bad, especially compared to Scott, but he hates that Scott finally knows it. He knows Scott won’t abandon him for it. He’ll still hold tight, help him shower after he throws himself up and materializes from a pile of bandages and lay him down and say it’s okay, it’s not your fault, you’re here now, it’s you, like he actually knows, and he thinks that’s the worst part.

Allison is dead, and so is Aiden, and he’s still alive. The thing he let in is the reason they’re dead. It took their lives. Stiles doesn’t know what it is it took from him or if he’ll ever get it back, but he’s still alive. And he thinks _that,_ actually, that’s the worst part.

It’s the worst of worst parts, and he dreams about watching Allison die, the blood on Scott’s shirt and hands and the way she went limp like a rag doll in his arms. Except this time she stands up, clutching at her stomach where the oni’s blade hit home and they’re not at the tunnels, they’re at the school. It’s dark. The hallway is empty.

“There’s always a price,” she’s saying, lips blood red and wet, “Did you really think there wouldn’t be a price? You saved your dad but you ruined us all. You let it in. You let it _in,_ Stiles.”

The corridor is so long and his throat is so dry. The thing hardly fed him when it was in his body. He came back into himself with cracked lips and a mouth full of sandpaper, feeling like he’d pass out if he stood up too fast.

“I’m sorry,” he tries to say, but it comes out as more of a whisper so he tries again, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I should’ve, I should’ve,” and he never gets to say what it is he should have done, because he’s gasping awake, teetering off the edge of his bed. He almost topples right over it, but a pair of warm hands pull him back up.

He notices vaguely that his window is open. It’s freezing. Or maybe that’s just him.

“Whoa,” Scott says, steadying, like there’s nothing weird about climbing through his window at—he glances blearily at the clock—four in the morning, “You're good, you’re fine, you’re fine, Stiles.”

“Scott?” He manages to say, voice raspy. He wonders if he’d been yelling.

“Yeah,” Scott says, absently rubbing at Stiles’ arms like he’s trying to sooth the dream away.

“What. What are—“

“Your window was open. And I couldn’t sleep.”

“Oh.” It sounds like it should be a lie, but Scott hardly ever lies to him. “Sorry.”

“For what?”

“Waking you up.”

“It’s fine,” Scott says, and his chin is hooked over Stiles’ shoulder now, even though Stiles doesn’t remember leaning forwards, face pressed against Scott’s warm chest, “You’re okay.”

He’s running his fingers through his hair lightly, like he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it. Stiles thinks of Allison and the blood on her fingers, the way it would make his hair sticky warm and gross, and suddenly feels the hot prick of tears in his eyes. What the fuck.

“What the fuck,” he says, rubbing at his eyes and ducking his head, “God, I'm sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Scott says again, like if he says it enough times it’ll be true, the way he willed his way through the mountain ash or promised to personally deck it out with frontotemporal dementia. “It’s okay.”

With Scott warm against him, it almost feels like it could be true.

He counts his fingers just in case.

 

Sleeping Pill Number One knocks him out quick and hard enough that he doesn’t wake up until his dad is shaking him by the shoulders and yelling his name in the middle of the road at give or take four in the early a.m. It’s cold. His feet are bare and all cut up from the asphalt and rocks in the front yard. He barely remembers what he was dreaming about.  

Number Two, prescribed by a different doctor, doesn’t help for shit—makes things worse, maybe. Jump starts the imagination that he already has too much of, been overflowing since he was old enough to talk. He hasn’t dreamt about Matt and his pet kanima/Jackson in literally over a year, but he wakes up choking and motionless under an invisible shoe pressing down on his neck.

Scott stays over one Friday when Stiles’ dad has the night shift because one of his deputies is out super sick - Stiles would say something about babying an how he’s not a fan and how it’s ruining his now Sixty Percent Success Rate Dealing-With-It Plan, but he doesn’t really wanna wake up in the woods or something again - and spends five minutes trying to wake Stiles up as he yells himself hoarse because Allison is dead and his dad his dying, Scott’s bleeding out because Stiles stuck a sword through him and Lydia is screaming and he’s the one that did this, the blood is on his hands and there’s so so much of it.

After he calms down, he washes his hands three times, Scott slumped against the bathroom doorway.

“There’s nothing there, man,” Scott says. He sounds so tired. Stiles is so sorry.

“I know,” he says, instead of _yes there is, there’s so much and I’ll never be able to wash it off._

He lies awake till morning with Scott’s arm draped over his waist, listening to the even sound of his breathing and trying to match his pace.

They throw Number Two out by the end of the next week.

 

The second time he has the dream, he makes the calm last as long as he can. Breathes in the smell of coffee and listens to the scrape of Scott flipping pancakes. The familiarity. How nice it feels, if he just ignores the sinking feeling in his chest.

He hears Scott inhale before he speaks, and knows exactly what he’s gonna day before he says it. It’s scary, deeper than deja vu because he answers the same way, too.

“I tried to kill you,” he says for the second time, focusing on the curl of Lydia’s hands around his favorite mug. The way her perfectly manicured nails contrast against the deep red.

Instead of saying _I know,_ Scott says, “You didn’t try to kill me. That’s wasn’t you. You tried to kill yourself.” A very long pause. “Why’d you do that?”

Stiles forces himself awake before his dream-self can even open his dream-mouth to answer.

 

Deaton gives him some weird magic herb shit as Attempt Number Three, and one of his famous long, vague, meaningful looks along with it. He’s sure that’s the closest he’ll get to ‘sucks I couldn’t teach you to close the door in your mind before an evil spirit could find its way in and fuck you over’. Stiles gives him what he hopes is a meaningful nod. It’s the closest he’ll get to ‘it’s whatever’.

The herb stuff works, because it’s supernatural and all that. At this point, he’s done questioning the supernatural. Best to just accept whatever weird shit happens next. The only thing that matters is that it knocks him out harder than the first one did and keeps him that way ‘til his alarm goes off. Stays with him throughout the day, though, makes him feel heavy and groggy and not all the way there.

It doesn’t clash well with the Adderall, so his head is always caught somewhere between razor sharp or all over the place. He can never seem to put his thoughts together, catches little things and then can’t focus on anything else, and he hates it. He lost enough time when there was something else living in his head with him, he doesn’t want a repeat of that, thank you very fucking much. He’d like to know exactly who’s in control of his actions and that it’s, preferably, himself.

So. Magic herbs only last him a solid week and a half before he can’t stand the messy head space stuff anymore.

Which means the dreams come back, but he can actually like, participate in class or make a coherent list of groceries in his head and drive at the same time. It’s a shitty balancing act and he’s always been a clumsy kid.

The Dealing With It plan has dropped down to about a thirty/forty percent success rate—this was so much easier to do when it was just his dad drinking and asking Scott’s mom to drive him to school only two or three times a week and walking the others with no supernatural creatures who can monitor pheromones or whatever anxiety smells like, but he’s working on it.

It’s—it’s a work in progress. And progress is good — just look at Malia!— so. He’s doing good.

 

He has That Dream, again, because of course he does. He knows what’s coming at soon as he hears the scrape of the spatula against the griddle. The smell of coffee. The quiet that felt so relaxing the first few times just feels like the calm before the storm, now. Every sip Lydia takes of her coffee is one sip closer to Scott opening his mouth and saying the stupid same thing he always says. If he looks at the halo of her hair the sunlight makes or watches the back of Scott’s head as he cooks, humming some familiar song, it’ll have to stop.

Scott breathes in. He opens a cabinet this time, pulls out three porcelain plates, nicer than anything they usually eat breakfast on, and turns around.

“Allison is dead,” he says, rubbing a finger over a crack in one of the plates. Stiles had hit it against the counter once when he’d been washing it. He hid it in the very back of the cabinet to hide the evidence from his dad. Scott’s always known all his secrets.

“She is,” he agrees, like he always does, because it’s all he knows how to say. “We stabbed you. We tried to hurt you. We tried to kill you.”

Scott raises a surprised eyebrow, opens his mouth to say something, but what Stiles said scares himself enough— _we_ tried to kill you, _we’re going to destroy everything, we’ve stopped shivering, we, we, we_ —that he wakes up yelling into his pillow.

 _It_ tried to kill Scott, he tells himself. It did. Not him— _not me_ , he thinks. _Not me. Not me._

 

“You were in my dream last night," he tells Scott the next day at lunch, for some reason. Their table feels empty, now. Malia’s in mandatory study hall because she missed eight years of school but none of the teachers seem to grasp that and think she’s just being lazy, and Kira’s trying to help her decipher the secrets of derivatives and related rates, so it’s just the three of them.

“Like a nightmare?” Scott asks, glancing up from his calc homework.

“I don’t know,” Stiles answers, “Not really, I don’t think. Maybe a little bit.”

“That’s vague. What was I doing?”

“Making breakfast. Lydia was there, too. We were talking about— something,” he says; it doesn’t seem scary right now, the way it does when he’s waiting for the ball to drop, “But it was nice before that. I’ve had it a few times.”

“How’s it end?”

Stiles shrugs, “It doesn’t. I always wake up.”

“I think,” Lydia says suddenly from her seat across the table; she doesn’t even look up from her book, “you should try to finish it. I think it’s important.”

"What, you’ve moved from banshee-ing to interpreting dreams?” Stiles asks.

“Banshee-ing?” she repeats.

“You know, being a banshee. Doing your special harbinger of death thing.”

“Don’t make up stupid words,” Lydia does that incredible roll of her eyes that made him fall in love with her back in second grade. “Anyway, I think it’s important,” she says again.

“Why?”

She just shrugs, turning back to tonight’s lit reading, “You’ve had it more than once, right? I think you should see how it ends.”

 

He doesn’t really plan on taking her advice. Mostly because he has this inherent instinct to not do what he’d told to—it’s probably a 'distrust of most authority figures' thing—but also because he doesn’t want to see how it ends. Maybe he doesn’t want it to end. He knows what to expect so far. He’s almost ridiculously, comically bad at dealing with change; he doesn’t want anything new, even if what he has right now isn’t good.

The next time he has the dream, he knows something is going to happen. And he’s tired of feeling the kind of dread he does when he’s supposed to be able to relax. It’s his kitchen. He should feel safe in his kitchen, with his friends. Pancakes shouldn't make him want to cover his ears like a five year old.

He’s too tired to do this again.

“You didn’t try to kill me,” Scott says, and he’s looking him straight in the eye this time. The plates are on the counter between them. The pancakes are done. “You tried to kill yourself. Why’d you do that?”

Stiles can only hold out for so long.

“It would’ve been better,” he says, his throat aching like it’s been torn out of him and he can’t take it back, “It could’ve stopped him. I thought I was going to die anyways. I only got out at all because you saved me.”

Lydia, of all the things in the world, smiles. Shakes her head a little like he being ridiculous. “Don’t you get it, Stiles?” she says, the first time she’s spoken in all of the dreams he's had, “We didn’t save you. You saved yourself.”

 

He wakes up crying. He doesn’t realize until he tries to rub the sleep out of his eyes and his hand comes away wet. It’s a quiet kind of crying, almost like an afterthought, breath lodged in his throat. He doesn’t even think to count his fingers.

 

“Did you ever finish that dream?” Scott asks a few days later, the three of them in the library with their homework spread out on the table. Lydia looks up expectantly.

“Yeah,” he admits.

“Was it a good ending?” Scott asks, like he’s ready to personally fight Stiles’ subconscious if it wasn’t.

Lydia raises her eyebrow, with that little twist of her lips she does when she knows something you don’t, which is a lot of the time.

Stiles thinks about it for a long moment. “Yeah,” he says, “Yeah, I think it was.”

 

(He never has the dream again.)

 

**Author's Note:**

> comments keep me young and radiant


End file.
